ROGUE WARRIOR®

by Richard Marcinko

  We fought about everything. We grew apart. The house was a place to drop my bags, do the laundry, and stay a couple of nights. It wasn’t a home. But I wasn’t about to let my personal life affect my command. You can’t let your feelings for your wife and kids intrude on getting the job done—if you do, you can get careless, and carelessness on my part could have caused fatalities.

  It’s not that marriages can’t and don’t survive the incredible stress commands such as SEAL Team Six place on commanding officers. Charlie Beckwith and his wife, Katharine, managed to get through the formation and deployment of Delta Force just fine. Paul Henley’s marriage survived the formation of Six. But weak marriages, as mine had become, are probably doomed. And to be honest about it, I wasn’t, at that time, a very caring husband at all.

  I realize I gave my wife a hard time. I know I gave the Navy Excedrin Headache Number Six. The very fact that SEAL Team Six was a covert unit caused problems sufficient to give any admin officer a head of prematurely gray hair.

  Officially, SEAL Team Six didn’t even exist. I may have been a commanding officer, but I didn’t have a command. I was on the books as the director of a civilian research facility in the Tidewater area, about thirty miles from Norfolk. Second, Six traveled almost 100 percent of the time. No Navy unit had ever spent so much of its time on the road—staying, for the most part, at civilian facilities. We used—and abused—rental cars, flew commercial (smuggling our weapons on board), and booked ourselves into hotels and motels without benefit of military ID. We may have trained at Eglin, but we stayed at half a dozen motels in the area instead of at the base itself. The pencil-pusher dip-dunks whined. I told them to shove their complaints.

  SEAL Team Six logistics became an administrative and bookkeeping nightmare. Imagine trying to keep track of roughly eighty guys, traveling twenty-nine days per month under assumed identities. There were huge numbers of receipts, piles of vouchers, and wads of claims to be audited. The confusion was compounded by the fact that we dealt mostly in cash, so as not to leave a paper trail (we were, after all, allegedly a covert unit). And when we traveled on military orders, we used fake IDs, nonexistent unit insignias, and signed receipts with all sorts of names—none of them ours. Those sorts of things probably gave Navy bean-counters a permanent case of the hives. I knew from personal experience they gave Ted Lyon Excedrin Headache Number Six.

  Even when we didn’t go commercial, we’d give the Navy problems. The Air Force was just beginning to deploy the gargantuan C-5A transport back then, and the giant plane could take the entire team and all our equipment in one load, whereas C-130 or C-141 travel required multiple aircraft, and we all had to arrive at the same time—unit integrity, remember? We practiced load-ins half a dozen times, then commandeered a C-5A and had the Air Force fly us to Louisiana, where we landed at a Naval Reserve station just outside New Orleans.

  We didn’t bother with advance warning or “permission to land, sir.” The base found out about us when our C-5A—and it is a big goddamn plane—dropped in, taxied to a stop, the front end opened up, and more than half a dozen cars and trucks filled with long-haired dirtbags waving automatic 276 weapons came pouring out, and drove right through the gate without so much as a hi-de-ho.

  There was, of course, one asshole officer who ran down the tarmac to greet us and sign us in,

  He huffed and he puffed and he waved his clipboard frantically. “Who are you? Where did you come from? Who said you could land here? Where are you going?”

  I blew him a kiss, showed him some of the fake IDs I’d created, signed Dwight David Eisenhower’s name to his paperwork, and told him to bug off. “Don’t worry about it, Lieutenant.” Then I put the pedal to the metal and disappeared. Somehow, word of our visit got back to Little Creek.

  I created a cover for Six, Freeport Marine Corporation. There were business cards and letterhead, and we demanded the corporate discount when we checked into Holiday Inns and signed out rental cars. I made friends with a Louisiana State Police commander named Billy Poe, who ran the LSP SWAT team. Billy got us tags and driver’s licenses, so we could switch the Virginia plates on the cars we flew down from Little Creek and check into hotels and motels with proper Louisiana ID. It may have been okay with the Cajuns for us to do what we did—but the Navy didn’t like it at all.

  Things came to a head in the last days of 1980. Ted Lyon and I had had our fair share of run-ins—battles over everything from purchasing to the chain-of-command structure, and I’d won every one of them. He’d gotten even in the way he knew best: on paper. As the commodore of NAVSPECWARGRU TWO, Ted wrote my fitreps. The one he composed for the fall and winter of 1980 was a work of art.

  “CDR Marcinko is an innovative gargorious [sic] officer who has accomplished a great deal in command of SEALTEAM SIX,” Ted wrote. But it worried him, he continued, that “Marcinko has, however, consistently displayed a trait which greatly concerns this reporting officer and our force commander; specifically he oftimes [sic] fails to observe the chain of command…. The relationship that exists between CDR Marcinko’s fledgling command and others in special warfare could be described as ‘We’ll do as we wish,‘ or ’Who needs you.‘I believe this to be a direct reflection of the man in charge. … CDR Marcinko must however conform to the Navy way and it is my intent that he do so.”

  Now, Ted summoned me again to his office, called me onto the carpet I knew all too well, and gave me another of his opinions.

  “Dick, the appearance of the men under your command is a disgrace to the Navy.”

  I explained—patiently, I thought—that SEAL Team Six had been given permission to operate under modified grooming standards.

  “There is modified, and there is unacceptable. Your team is unacceptable. I want you to get them cleaned up.”

  “And what about the civilian look they’re supposed to have, Ted? They’re supposed to be able to pass for blue-collar workers or students or—”

  “Have them wear wigs,” he interrupted.

  “That’s a great idea, Ted. Just one inspired notion. I can just see them free-falling from twenty-five thousand feet, unfurling their fucking wigs. Or—what about as they’re fastroping to pop through a window—‘’Scuse me, Mr. Terrorist, but I have to fix my wig before I can wax you.”

  “Dick—”

  “What kind of dip-dunk shit-for-brains asshole idea is that, Ted? These guys have to be able to infiltrate foreign airports, or go through fucking border checkpoints manned by secret fucking policemen—and you want them to wear goddamn wigs? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

  He bristled. “I’m talking about maintaining some kind of discipline. Your people are out of control.” He frowned. Something on his desk was askew. Gingerly, Ted slid a cup of sharpened pencils half an inch, restoring it to its assigned position. Then he got back to me. “Look, Dick, I’m not talking about white-walls here. But modified grooming standards means hair that touches the ears, not Fu Manchu mustaches and ponytails. Those styles are offensive to the Navy. They make your men stand out too much. Which leads me to a second problem. I’m getting complaints from other commanders—they’re beginning to have difficulties with their own men. SEAL Team Six is a bad influence and it’s disrupting the whole base.”

  “Too bad, Ted. I seem to recall that when I commandedSEAL Two, I had a hard-and-fast rule about no facial hair, and I made it stick. If the current CO can’t handle his men, it’s his prob, not mine.”

  Ted rolled his eyes and dismissed me. About a week later, I discovered he’d received a long memo from SURFLANT’s commander, Admiral J. D. Johnson, complaining about Six’s grooming standards, and demanding that Ted do something about it. I couldn’t prove Ted engineered the admiral’s complaint, but I had a pretty good idea he was behind it.

  Well, there were ways to deal with Commodore Lyon. One of the first lessons I’d learned in Vietnam was, “Don’t wait for the enemy to come to you—take it to the enemy.” Of course, Commodore Edward Lyon III wouldn’t
know that tactic. He had never deployed to fight in Vietnam. Doom on you, Ted.

  I called Brigadier General Richard Scholtes, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command—JSOC—at Ft. Bragg. Scholtes was my true boss. Just as with Bill Crowe, I was on a first-name basis with Scholtes.

  “General,” I said, “I’m taking a whole bunch of flak from our asshole commodore down here, Ted Lyon. What about coming up for a personnel inspection? You’re the operational commander, and if our hair’s too long or our area’s not policed, it’s up to you to tell me to straighten up, not Ted.”

  Scholtes agreed and said he’d show up the following Saturday at 0900 hours.

  Normally, uniform inspections would be done on the parade ground. But because Six was a clandestine unit, we held ours inside one of the two chicken coops behind SEAL Team Two. On Friday, the whole team policed the area—officers and enlisted men alike—raking up dead leaves and pinecones. I thought about adding an Ev Barrett border of beer cans to the walkways, but I decided that in this case, less would be more. Then we scrubbed down the chicken coops the best we could, although there wasn’t much we could do to improve on what was basically a shitty situation.

  On Saturday at 0700 I assembled my entire command in Class—A dress blue uniforms and medals. The officers wore swords and white gloves. We were an impressive group: one of my chief petty officers, Mikey T, had won the Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam. He wore it around his neck. There were scores of other decorations, ranging from Silver and Bronze stars to various commendation medals, campaign awards, and Purple Hearts.

  I’ve never been one for medals. In Vietnam, Drew Dix and Harry Humphries went out to rescue Maggie the Nurse and a bunch of other civilians during the battle of Chau Doc. The Army gave Drew a Medal of Honor for his actions that day; I recommended Harry for a Bronze Star, although when I learned what the Army had done for Drew I upped it to a Silver Star. So far as I was concerned, Harry was just doing his job as a SEAL, and medals be damned. Others, however, are impressed by commendations. So, we all wore every medal we owned. I had the Team snap to attention a few times just to get their timing down. The metal clanging on their chests sounded like fucking glockenspiels. We went over a few details, then I slipped over to the chicken coop in which I had my workspace and waited for Dick Scholtes to show up. I wanted a few minutes with him alone.

  Dick Scholtes wasn’t a Special Forces operator—in fact, although he’d graduated from SF school, he’d always refused to wear the blanket, the green beret. He was much more an old-fashioned soldier, a no-shit, gruff, grind-it-out conventional warrior who proudly wore his Eighty-second Airborne tie clasp and belt buckle whenever he dressed in civilian clothes. I’d always had the feeling that he’d been slightly disappointed at being given command of JSOC. He would have preferred to lead a parachute division. But if he was let down, we couldn’t tell it from his leadership, which was supportive and kick-ass in its style.

  At precisely 0900, General Scholtes arrived from Ft. Bragg, his big chopper setting down on the main pad at Little Creek. I sent one of my admin pukes to pick him up, explaining that I was in uniform and therefore couldn’t be seen on the base.

  To get to our chicken coops he had to walk through the SEAL Team Two area, which had not been policed very well. General Scholtes took careful note, then walked through the front door of my HQ.

  I saluted. “Sir.”

  He returned the salute, eyeballing my uniform, sword, white gloves, Silver Star, four Bronze Stars, and Wolfman facial hair. “Nice beard, Dick. You always let your eyebrows grow down to your cheeks?”

  “Only when I’m allowed to modify my grooming standards, or in the jungle, sir.”

  He shrugged. “Sounds good to me.” He began to inspect his surroundings carefully, and his face screwed into a frown. “No rugs—nothing for the floors?”

  “Nope.”

  “Nothing for the walls, either?”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “These desks look like crap.”

  “They are, General.”

  “Jeez, Dick, what a shithouse. Is this all they could give you?”

  “I’m glad you noticed. This is the office I share with my XO, my ops boss, and my command master chief. If you’d like, I’ll take you to see the two heads. They both flush on command at least fifty percent of the time.”

  “Pass on that,” Scholtes said. “You got any coffee?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So how’s it going—aside from the accommodations?”

  “Good.” I poured him a mug and passed it over. “I don’t mind this crap because we’ll be moving to our permanent home base as soon as they finish building our facilities there. Besides, General, we’re not here very much. If you look out at the backyard, there ain’t a single oil rig to climb or ship to board. And OPSEC doesn’t allow us to shinny the anchor chains down at the amphibious base. We go way out in the ocean to chase ships. We shoot in Florida, we jump in Arizona, and we climb in Louisiana. Besides, there’s too many SEALs around here. They know us, we know them—that makes it hard on everybody.”

  “Agreed. And what about the chain-of-command bullshit?”

  “I guess I’m just gonna have to live with it.”

  Scholtes nodded in agreement. “Large organizations,” he said, “have trouble dealing with unprecedented efforts. They like going by the book. They live by a set of hard-and-fast rules. But in your case, Dick, there is no book. In SpecWar, there are no rules—or at least no rules that are comprehensible to anybody whose whole career has been spent thinking conventionally. Take Ted Lyon—”

  “Do I have to?”

  He laughed. “I think you’re stuck with him. Look, Ted probably views you the same way staff officers look at anything or anybody who’s out of the ordinary—as some rogue elephant trampling all over his turf. He deals with your requests the same way he handles memos about ordering more toilet paper or ballpoint pens. People like that have no vision—they can’t see why the mission you’ve been assigned gives you any priority. They want you to wait on line with the rest of the assholes.”

  “I understand that, sir—intellectually. But it’s becoming real hard to live with, day to day.’

  “Roger that,” said Scholtes.

  “Thing is, General, it’s all a bunch of goddamn dip-shit numb-nuts nit-picking, like this grooming-standards bullshit that brought you here today.” I told Scholtes about Ted’s suggestion that Six wear wigs.

  “This guy sounds like a real tightass,” he said. “Look—I’ll do what I can for you.” He drained his coffee and stood up. “Well. Dick, let’s get to it.”

  We walked across the breezeway between the chicken coops. At the door, I called out, “Inspection party arriving.”

  The door opened from the inside. Mikey T was holding it. The general looked back at me over his shoulder. “You son of a bitch,” he said, a smile on his face. Then he saluted Mikey. Protocol says that all Medal of Honor winners get saluted. Mikey returned the salute, a big smile on his face. From inside, I heard Paul call out, “Attention on deck!” and the sound of the Team coming together as one man—bang.

  I stood by General Scholtes’s shoulder. “Sir,” I said, “we are ready for your inspection.”

  So he moved up and down the lines, pausing by each man to inspect his medals and check out the grooming standards. No one wore earrings or ponytails, and everyone’s hair was washed and combed. They didn’t look pretty, but they were presentable.

  After eight or ten minutes, the general had seen enough. He stood in front of the Team. “Have them stand at ease, Dick.”

  I nodded to Paul. “Team—at ease.”

  “I’m glad to be here,” Scholtes said. “Glad because I’m proud of you men—proud of how far you’ve come in so little time. Proud because you have dedicated yourselves to carrying out a tough mission, which I know you’ll carry out as ordered. And proud because you look to be in super shape.”

  He cleared his
throat. “I’m impressed by the medals you wear. It is obvious to me that you know your jobs and are good at them. I am saddened, though, at the conditions in which you live here. I will do my best to help your commanding officer rectify the situation.

  “You gentlemen are building up an expertise that no one else in the world has—keep up the good work, and God bless you all.”

  The following week, I was told about a rocket sent from General Scholtes to Admiral Johnson. The gist of the message was: Dear Admiral, I’m happy to report that I held a successful personnel inspection of SEAL Team Six. The men met my grooming standards, given the clandestine, worldwide mission they have been tasked to accomplish. I was, however, appalled by the conditions under which they have been forced to live at Little Creek. I was further horrified by the sorry state of the SEAL Team Two compound, through which I had to pass on my way to visit SEAL Team Six. The number of soda and beer cans, cigarette butts, and other detritus on the ground was shocking and was grave evidence that details are not being properly taken care of by those in authority. It seems to me that instead of harassing SEAL Team Six, the administrative chain of command at NAVSPECWARGRU TWO under Commodore Edward Lyon III could better spend its time taking care of matters that truly concern it. Strong message follows. Love, kisses, and fuck you very much, your pals at JSOC.

  Doom on you again, Ted.

  In between training cycles, Paul and I ran head games on our beloved little boys. We’d spend the day, for example, twenty-five miles out in the ocean, running through 12-foot waves in our Boston whalers, working on boarding techniques. Boarding a ship under way at, say, twenty knots was simple. All we had to do was run our boats up behind a big humongous ship without being seen, hook a steel ladder on a 30-foot pole to the stem, and climb up. Of course, the waves were slapping our Boston whalers around like crazy, the ladder was cold and slippery, and we had to be prepared to shoot anybody who peered over the fantail as we were boarding. And if one of us slipped and fell, the propeller, which was going whomp-whomp-whomp between our legs as we climbed, would grind the poor unfortunate into hamburger.